Faith, Identity and Magical Realism in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (original) (raw)
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A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF CULTURAL CONFLICT IN LEILA ABOULELA'S BIRD SUMMONS
Culture is a way of thinking, behaving, or working in a particular place or country. While conflict is a difference that prevents agreement, the opposition of persons or forces gives rise to dramatic action in a drama or fiction. Since culture is a way of life that differs from one person to another, there is a possibility of cultural conflict when different people with different cultures come together or when a particular group starts living with other extraordinary sets of people with varying ways of life. This research critically examines cultural conflict in Leila Aboulela's Bird Summons using textual and descriptive methods and adapting the sociological and psychological social identity theory as a framework. It used inductive content analysis to explore the book's themes and comparative analysis to compare themes of cultural conflict with other literary works that deal with similar themes or issues. Overall, the article concludes that the story revolves around the Afro-Arab character's effort to integrate and fit into the Western system, which differs from their culture. The analysis identified the themes of intercultural marriage, culture shock, migration, cultural adjustment, and ethnocentrism and how they cause internal and external conflicts, impact personal identities, and test the character's ability to adapt to and handle life's challenges in a multicultural world.
A Study Of Postcolonial Magical Realism in Red BIrds
SSRN, 2023
The paper analyses Hanif’s Red Birds (2018) with the lens of Postcolonial magical realism. Magical realism accounts for the presence of magical characters or events in a realistic setting. As per the postcolonial magical realism, the technique is employed to deconstruct the colonial representation and narrative regarding an idea and to bring forth an unsung, unknown, native narrative to the front. The paper uses narrative analysis technique and investigates the role of setting and the depiction of war-torn region in the novel, Red Birds (2018). The paper concludes substantiating the role of magical realism to render a rigid critique and presenting the untold and unseen picture of the colonized as well as that of colonizers’ perspective of war and its aftermaths.
30/09/, 2024
The current study analyzes the linguistic choices and the language qualities through the co-textual study of the magical and mythical stories inscribed in literary texts in Pakistani fiction, A Firefly in the Dark by Haider (2018). The novel retrieves Pakistani history or magical and cultural embedment wherein these emerged. The aim is to examine whether the selected text involves language that deals with stories based upon magical realities, dreaming qualities, stories of ghosts and gods, daydreaming, horror and myth, imagery and identity, and an amalgamation of rational and irrational worldviews. The textual study would more deeply grasp the historical context and aspects of magical realism and mythmaking linguistic choices inherent in the respective writings. The research is carried out by developing an analytical framework from the existing theories of magical realism by Faris ( 2004) and Campbell’s theory of hero, mythmaking, and monomyth (Campbell, 1988). By connecting traditional mythmaking with cutting-edge storytelling techniques, Shazaf Fatima Haider's A Firefly in the Dark encompasses the fundamental values of magical realism. By applying the analytical framework to this work, the research examined the text's bridging of the mythmaking traditions and gained a fresh perspective on cultural narratives. It may also open the door to a vast investigation of the language employed in magical and myth-forming literature from South Asia.
Journal of Social and Political Sciences, 2024
This paper claims that the Egyptian movie, Feathers (El Zohairy 2021) uses the genre of magical realism as a tool of postcolonial dissent and transcendence: by providing insight into social injustice, by transcending norms and realities, and by deflecting censorship. The paper argues that Feathers has used magical realism to both provoke (ruffle) and deflect (un-ruffle) political outrage. This movie depicts the liberating journey of a rural housewife whose bullying husband has been magically turned into a chicken, relentlessly echoing the traditional Egyptian proverb that 'one woman is worth a hundred men' ('El sett B 100 ragel'). The film received international critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival. But nationalistic critics and directors have used post-colonial discourse to accuse its director of Othering and belittling Egypt. This paper in contrast uses multimodal discourse analysis to explore the ways in which Feathers uses magical realism to highlight and personalize and transcend the social injustice in Egypt, and in the Third World. On the other hand, Feathers deflects political outrage by using magical realism to locate its characters and plot in the past, by depicting local businesses rather than transnational investments and megaprojects, and by exploring the magic of personal transformation. By using magical realism as a tool of postcolonial dissent and transcendence, the director has portrayed important truths behind Egyptian norms and realities, and at the same time miraculously protected both the movie and himself.
Together-in-Diaspora: Narratives of Spatial Identities in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons
Forum for World Literature Studies, 2023
Contemporary Anglophone Arab novelists seek to negotiate traumatic issues related to diaspora, adaptation, fragmentation, and identity transformation. They attempt to reveal how dislocated diasporic identities are weighed down by ambivalent wounded consciousnesses. This paper sets out to negotiate the issue of dislocation narratives of diaspora in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019), its representation, and its impact on transformation and self-discovery. It also reveals narrative experimentations and techniques as a way of artistic representation to expose the crisis and conflict of individual choice and existentialism. Aboulela uses a spatial metaphorical journey to open a space of spiritual freedom of the self through traveling and crossing boundaries to a religious space. In this regard, the protagonists of the novel travel to achieve a transformation within the consciousness of the individual intellectually and spiritually. It is in this sense that the diasporic characters of Bird Summons have finally eloped from an elusive matrix of inside and outside, being and becoming, social dissonance, and ambiguities of identity
Construction, Deconstruction, and the Question of Authorship in Magical Realist Narratives
Voice of Teacher, 2023
Colonial discourse in particular has constructed fixed frames and grids in which to place and separate individuals according to their class, race, gender, culture, nationality and ethnic models of unified and stereotypical representation of otherness and difference which postcolonial writers challenge. Writers from across the globe have adopted and adapted magical realism to fit their own cultures and within their own frame of reference. As a dominant literary mode, it can be considered as a decolonizing agent in a postmodern context. What the narrative mode offers is a way to discuss alternative approaches to reality to that of Western philosophy, expressed in contemporary fiction. Specifically, this paper argues how magical realism is positioned in relation to the two contrasting operations of construction and deconstruction. What is its capacity to effect either or both of these outcomes? A prominent view has developed which understands the mode as one that structures an exclusively deconstructive narratology. I explore the narratives of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirit, Tony Morrison's Beloved and Hashem Garaibeh's The Cat Who Taught Me How To Fly that reiterate realist narrative conventions subversively to critique the effects of colonialism as a decolonizing device in the contemporary literary scholarship. This study utilizes the ideas from Stephen Slemon's "resistance to colonialism," Theo D'haen's "decenter privileged centers,", Wendy B. Faris's "Questioning the colonial subjugation," and Christopher Warnes's 'deconstructive notions of subjectivity" and "recover and affirm identities." Thus, the narratives in opposition to the notion of absolute history emphasizes the possibility of simultaneous existence of multiple truths and plural meanings.
Power, Narrative, and Magical Realism in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ
Journal of Arabic Literature
This article examines the narrative and literary techniques employed in Hudā Ḥamad’s Sindrīllāt Masqaṭ to draw on Omani women’s experiences of writing and speaking as sources of empowerment and narrative identity. Marking a shift from the dominant realistic and historical fiction often associated with male writers, Ḥamad experiments with magical realism, the carnivalesque, intertextuality, and metafiction to reconfigure the novelistic genre beyond the national prescriptions of literary production. Through the voice of the narrator, alongside the voices of other ordinary women, the novel underscores the significance of women’s symbolic practices within the societal and cultural boundaries of Oman. In an allegory of writing—a major thread running throughout the novel—the narrator/writer seeks to combine the composite, multiple, and fictional fragments of various women’s stories into a single readable text that preserves oral and cultural memory. Thus, on the one hand, this article...
IN THE TRACKS OF AN OXYMORON: MAGICAL REALISM IN THE TRACKS OF AN OXYMORON: MAGICAL REALISM
2021
Magical realism is often viewed as the literary product of Latin America. Starting with Franz Roth's 1925 essay in which the term magical realism was coined, as well as Alejo Carpentier's classic 1949 essay that introduced the concept of lo real maravilloso to the Americas, this volume offers a wide range of critical perspectives and theoretical approaches to magical realism. Situating magical realism within the expanse of literary and cultural history, this book acknowledges its revitalizing force as a literary narrative mode. Combining interpretations of well-known literary texts from world literatures, with a specific focus on U. S. ethnic literatures, Magical Realism: In the Tracks of an Oxymoron presents a global understanding of the broad influence of magical realism. Amidst complex definitional and conceptual questions, this book confirms magical realism's strength to disrupt monologic political and cultural agendas. It is the propensity of magical realist texts to host a variety worlds and voices that makes it a subversive, transgressive, and transcultural narrative mode. Magic realism alters established structures of thought, reconstructs histories that have been silenced by political and social injustices; it makes the invisible visible while welcoming us into a journey across alternative historical, cultural, and political, territories. With this book I intend to host readers in worlds transformed and enhanced accordingly.